Recently, many have claimed that AI coding tools will soon make software developers obsolete. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people in the United States employed as software developers in 2021 was 1,364,180. The figure for 2022 has yet to be published, but is scheduled to be published later this year.
This question resolves to YES if the number of people employed as "software developers" in the United States declines by more than 15% from 2023 to 2028 as determined by data published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Otherwise, it resolves to NO.
In case the BLS declines to publish the relevant figures before 2030, this question resolves to N/A. If the BLS changes the definition of "software developer" substantially, or their method of counting those employed changes substantially, this question will also resolve to N/A, and I will judge whether the change was "substantial" at my sole discretion.
The BLS provides this footnote: "Estimates for detailed occupations do not sum to the totals because the totals include occupations not shown separately. Estimates do not include self-employed workers."
If anything we're going to need more programmers due to all of the crappy spaghetti code that is going to get printed out by junior programmers in an effort to cut costs by management that has no clue what they are doing. Using A.I. to write code is legit, but has a high risk of technical debt (which is not a bad thing) ... that being said, eventually the debt comes due. I do see software engineers as a profession dipping slightly for various reasons including A.I. temporary, but it will turn around by 2030, that's well within a cycle. I did a more advanced treatment of LLM-produced code here at this video, am coming out with another episode on this soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmIol4mnLo